Bookpacking’s Blog

Germany; Weimar; ACC gallery/cafe; “Kangaroos Run Wild in Weimar” exhibition

Another little Weimar bonus tonight. Stopping off at the gallery/café ACC we saw a sign for an event that evening discussing Australia’s image, as portrayed to Germans in mainstream film. Dipping into overdubbed films ranging from Walkabout to Priscilla to Rabbit Proof Fence, local academic/artist Olaf Nenninger presented a compilation of clips to show how manufactured and manipulated this portrayal is.

All countries self-mythologise. America focuses on the Wild West and the Revolution; in Britain we have WW2 when ‘we were all in it together’. But living in Europe and having worked in Australia, Bookpacking is aware that it exists today as a brand; something for foreign tourists like ourselves to buy into.

Thus the recent film with Nicole Kidman can be seen (and visiting Aussie artist and war correspondent George Gittoes confirmed it was) as a huge advertising vehicle, leading a tourist board charge. Fellow Aussie and artist/activist Deborah Kelly pointed out that it is one of the most urbanised countries in the world, yet the images associated with it are of landscapes not cities.

The celebrated Gittoes – who has worked with Michael Moore and has his own Iraq-related release “Soundtrack to War” – has some experience of working with Aborigines in the Northern Territory, and so was qualified to give us a list of what we ought to see to get a more realistic picture of the country and its Aboriginal people.

Gittoes’ list:
They’re a Weird Mob
The Last Wave
Romper Stomper
10 Canoes (highly recommended)

Deborah Kelly also recommends:
The Boys
Head On

An aside from Bookpacking:

One of the curators asked George and Deborah if they could relate to these desert/outback landscapes. A valid question, and they answered in the affirmative.

But if you are a European who has never been to either Australia or America, it can be difficult to fully grasp the scale of the individual countries. An office worker may live in the suburbs of Melbourne, taking a tram to his office job in the cold rain, suited and booted. In the centre, another guy in jeans and bush hat might be working on a cattle station the size of Belgium which is running out of water. Even further north, a Park Ranger in stereotypical Blundstone boots and short-shorts might be dodging crocodiles on the rounds of his tropical reserve.

Of course there’s a certain homogeneity to the culture, but the environments are very different. Cultural/language differences aside, it’d be like asking someone who farms in Morocco if they can relate their surroundings to an office worker in Switzerland. Some things really do have to be seen to be appreciated.

 Czech Republic; Prague; Kafka Museum

Kafka is often credited with having anticipated the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century. Visiting the Kafka Museum in Prague, it’s easy to see why. The powerless individual helpless against an unfair and uncaring system whose decisions make no sense perfectly sums up the life under communism that one often reads about; everybody agreeing that the sky is green while staring directly into the clear blue.

Yet it was obvious that Kafka was a prisoner not of some external system, but of his own mind. As one display panel points out, he was never able to commit to a relationship because he was never able to “shake himself free of the rules he himself had imposed”. Just like one of his major writing influences, Flaubert, he also sought refuge in long-distance relationships and the abstract world of a love conducted by letters; where he could control things.

Kafka is yet another tortured artist who seems to prove the maxim that the best art comes out of pain. The allegorical Prague he dreamt up was composed of walls and boundaries which he had built for himself. Self-loathing and a hatred of his own body meant he was always held back. He found solace in the “Prague Four” band of intellectual friends, and gave himself eventually to his first love – literature.

He was the perfect example of the frustrated artist, driven to the edge of insanity by the mundane of a 9-5 that he hated. One of the sections of the museum is called “The Endless Office”. Anyone who has been in job that feels like a slow cerebral death can sympathise with that feeling of being trapped; a purgatorial paralysis of the mind and a overwhelming sense of stagnation. One of the displays refers to those “infinite” eight hours of the working day.

But if there is a hero in this realm of anti’s, it is Kafka’s comrade Max Brod. Nietzsche was dishonoured in death by a sister who manipulated his pre-life coaching message of liberation from the self (the “will to power”) to suit Nazi ends; but Kafka owes Brod a big posthumous debt. In life, Brod had recognised and nurtured Kafka’s superior talent. In death, Brod went against the wishes of his loved and respected friend, and bravely but guiltily disregarded Kafka’s request to burn his manuscripts. A tree fell in the literary forest; and thanks to Brod, we heard it.

 Hungary; Budapest; Terror House

History is very much alive in this part of the world. A couple of decades is nothing, and even if the teenagers of today don’t remember Communism, their parents do. And while some countries try to move on as quickly as possible, glossing over the past with a ’sleeping dogs lie’ attitude, others take time to remember what went before.

Contrasting with the Slovakian indifference we found in Bratislava, here the excellent Terror House museum not only commemorates the victims – it names the guilty. From the menacing Soviet tank which sits under victims’ mug-shots, to the chapel-like cellar which contains their names, the moving exhibition tells reminds us not to forget the victims of one of the Eastern Bloc’s relatively moderate regimes. The museum is situated in the very building where the Secret Police of both Nazi and Soviet regimes operated, and it rams home the point that Fascism and Communism were but different brands of the same kind of systemic oppression and control.

But surprisingly, another wall names and shames some of the torturers. Or perhaps that’s not surprising. Perhaps what’s surprising is that there isn’t more of this in the other countries we visited. Is this testament to the power of forgiveness, or an indication of unfinished business and a lack of lustration? Only time will tell.